Thousands have died so that Iraqis might partake of democracy's sacrament. In the following essay, which I’ve been tweaking for ten years, I explain why I long ago apostatized from one of modernity's cults, after which I append links to complementary essays.

* * *
I don’t vote, but not because I am apathetic. Pulling levers in a booth is not so inconvenient that I would not endure it for the sake of a compensating good to which I am entitled.

The alleged compensating good, however, escapes me, whereas the evil attaching to it is obvious and substantial.

When shareholders vote on corporate policies they exercise their own property rights. They violate no one else’s. Neither do club members when they elect officers. Citizens of a democracy, however, are neither shareholders nor club members. They are rather seekers of ends whose achievement requires the control of resources they do not own without regard for the wishes of those who do own them. Voters therefore are accomplices to a system of brigandage.

The control or confiscation of property through taxation, regulation, or restriction of trade, however, comprises virtually all of the "issues" of political elections. If individuals lack rights in scarce resources, they can hardly acquire such rights simply by voting them into existence by fiat. Leave to elections only those decisions that honor that moral reality and nothing is left. Even voting to repeal bad legal code legitimizes the process by which more will be enacted.

Mindless slogans like, "Bad people are sent to Washington by good people who don’t vote," apparently intended to induce guilt, suggest that non-agents are agents, that those who refrain from acting are responsible for acting. But nonvoters do not send anyone anywhere. If nobody voted, nobody, good or evil, would be sent to Washington.

That is, if they gave an election and nobody came, no one could claim to tax and draft "by the power vested in them by the people.” Free people on free markets would determine who receive which goods and services, including the socially necessary services like police now monopolized by the State, and including charitable services for those unable to earn for themselves.

Increasingly, eligible voters prefer to be left alone. Of those who register to vote, however, most seem to prefer to attain monopoly (non-market-derived) privilege for themselves, or to influence the conduct of monopolies, than to abolish them. The tragic, unintended result, however, is that they (and/or their loved ones) are lied to, robbed, enslaved, and sometimes even killed, either in a war on foreign soil or on the streets the State’s police cannot or will not protect. This is the price they pay for being so uncreative as to rely on voting to "make a difference."

I withdrew my “consent to be governed” long ago. Why don’t you withdraw yours?

April 24, 1996
(revised October 28, 2006)


Anti-Democracy 101

Butler Shaffer, Don't Vote [2006]

David Gordon, What's the Argument for Democracy? [2005]

Butler Shaffer, The Rational Choice for Election Day [2004]

Hans Hoppe, Why Bad Men Rule [2004]

Hans Hoppe, Down with Democracy [2000] See Hoppe's site for more articles and information about his Democracy: The God That Failed

Murray N. Rothbard, On Democracy [1962]

In “We’re Living in the Dream World of George W. Bush” on today’s LewRockwell, Gene Callahan exploits the irony that neocons, presumptive heirs to a political movement that once took seriously Eric Voegelin’s diagnosis of modernity as gnostic, are now that spiritual malady’s poster children. As a White House adviser lectured New York Times’ writer Ron Suskind two years ago (Callahan provides the link):

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

As Callahan suggests, they’re also history’s patients.

While we’re on the Voegelinian topic of existence in untruth, let’s hear a few words from the master:

In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists . . . . And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence—with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. . . . [B]ehind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.

. . . The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth; they are useless in a meeting with edifices of reason erected on a different experiential basis. Nevertheless, we cannot withdraw into these edifices and let the world go by, for in that case we would be remiss in our duty of “debate.” The “debate” has, therefore, to assume the forms of (1) a careful analysis of the noetic structure of existence and (2) an analysis of Second Realities with regard to both their constructs and the motivating structure of existence in untruth. “Debate” in this form is hardly a matter of reasoning (though it remains one of the Intellect), but rather of the analysis of existence preceding rational constructions; it is medical in character in that it has to diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence and by their noetic structure to initiate, if possible, a healing process.

“On Debate and Existence”
Intercollegiate Review, 1967; Collected Works, Vol. 12

I'm delighted to have just learned that on Thursday, October 19, the day I posted No Denial of Any Kind Should Be a Crime Anywhere, the contents of which I had sent who-knows-where back in January, Oxford's historian of post-war Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, made a case for scrapping Holocaust denial laws and got it published in the Guardian.

I had noted that "'The Holocaust' refers to many thousands of events over a dozen years. Some historical narratives that were once widely accepted as having a factual basis have lost that status. Only historical inquiry, not legal compulsion, can responsibly impute credibility to one account and deny it to another." But somehow it carries more weight when coming from an Oxonian historian:

"No one can legislate historical truth. In so far as historical truth can be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts, testing and disputing each other's claims without fear of prosecution or persecution."

I had noted that the "irony of punishing speech in the name of preventing a 'resurgence of Nazism' may be lost on the punishers, but not on their victims and their supporters. Those laws therefore become unintended liabilities in the fight against any such 'resurgence.'" As Ash put it more tersely:

"Those European countries that have them should repeal not only their blasphemy laws but also their laws on Holocaust denial. Otherwise the charge of double standards is impossible to refute. What's sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander."

The remarkable op-ed concludes:

"Today, if we want to defend free speech in our own countries and to encourage it in places where it is currently denied, we should be calling for David Irving to be released from his Austrian prison. . . . Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for dismantling them. We must practice what we preach."

Sometimes putting in one's own two cents means alerting others to the gold bar that was just invested in an urgent contemporary debate. If that is the only role courageous voices like Professor Ash's leaves me, and I am happy to play it.

One can hardly imagine the Anti-Defamation League’s Director Abe Foxman storming a stage to prevent NYU Remarque Institute Director and historian Tony Judt from speaking on the Israeli lobby’s inordinate influence on U.S. foreign policy. On that same day leftists did exactly that to prevent (in the name of fighting fascism, of course) Minuteman Jim Gilchrist from speaking on immigration at Columbia University.

That’s what the ineffectual do when confronted with ideas whose flow they wish to arrest. Instead, however, they were arrested.

Such antics are beneath Foxman. He need only pick up the phone—more than once, if necessary—to “look into” the matter. The Polish Ambassador is not a child. He does not have to be asked to cancel Judt. “The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure,” Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk said. “That's obvious—we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that.” Foxman can therefore say with a straight face, “We had nothing to do with the cancellation. . . . We didn’t ask for it.”

The Consulate’s Marek Skulimowski took a different approach. The Consulate, he explained, “is a diplomatic post. Whatever is organized here should be in compliance with Poland's foreign policy.” The President of Poland recently paid a visit to Israel, you see, and a talk critical of Israel in a rented room within the Polish Consulate in New York City, even if given by a Jewish individual who lost family members to the Nazis, would apparently be noncompliant.

Network 20/20, the discussion group that invited Judt, meets regularly at the Consulate. But not before October 4 did they know that compliance with a foreign country’s foreign policy was a condition of their leasing space.

That Professor Judt will speak and write about on his chosen topic elsewhere, at least for now, does not diminish the significance of this episode that seemed designed to illustrate the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis. This impeding of the circulation of certain views was “the right thing,” according to American Jewish Committee’s David Harris.

Of course, had Consul General Kasprzyk told Foxman to mind his business, the “resurgence of official Polish anti-Semitism” would still be headline news. But that didn’t happen, and Foxman is free to smear any imputation of pressure to him as “the conspiratorial nonsense that Mearsheimer and Walt are spinning with the support of Tony Judt.”

Read Foxman’s own press releases on this matter here and here. For reportage of varying usefulness that the ADL would like to flush down the memory hole, this site seems to provide one-stop shopping.

Not only should the Iranian President not be prosecuted (by Germany!) for expressing views (in Iran!) that many find offensive, neither should anyone else. For several reasons, statutes criminalizing "denying the Holocaust" tend to discredit the legal systems that contain them:

(1) One group’s feelings may be protected, while another group of offended are treated to a lecture on the sanctity of free speech (e.g., those notorious Dutch cartoons).

(2) The laws do not define the event whose occurrence is allegedly being denied. They therefore blur the difference between universal and particular skepticism. In practice, Holocaust denial laws treat those who raise questions about particular events as lunatic doubters of a whole class of events. "The Holocaust" refers to many thousands of events over a dozen years. Some historical narratives that were once widely accepted as having a factual basis have lost that status. Only historical inquiry, not legal compulsion, can responsibly impute credibility to one account and deny it to another.

(3) The irony of punishing speech in the name of preventing a “resurgence of Nazism” may be lost on the punishers, but not on their victims and their supporters. Those laws therefore become unintended liabilities in the fight against any such “resurgence.”

Last week The University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer debated the topic of the Israel Lobby’s influence with lobbyists Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross at Cooper Union (site of the 1860 Lincoln-Douglas debate) in New York. The London Review of Books sponsored the event, and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Center’s Anne Marie Slaughter chaired it. I’m on the lookout for such news, but learned of it late when I was forwarded this article, which concludes:

The packed audience in the hall was often partisan, cheering for particular sides in this debate, but it seemed largely supportive of Prof. Mearsheimer and was kept in balance by the able hand of Dr. Slaughter. It was a travesty of news coverage that it was not televised, not even by C-Span, and no major media covered the event, including the major newspapers.

Were these nobodies debating an arcane topic in some hole-in-the-wall? No, the topic was timely, and the participants, sponsor, chairperson, and venue of the highest quality.

Would only a conspiracy nut conclude that our major media’s gatekeepers simply decided to black out the “undebatable” — even when it is in fact debated?